The Artists Perception - BFM

“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at — not copy it” — O’Keefe 


As I wondered about the creative work that formed from my viewing of the world (walking across campus, or through Santa Fe neighborhoods) I started to ponder the vastness of visual feelings that one could see. In the moments of pulling oneself out of the collapsing world within your consciousness to the actualization without, what did you see? Maybe for some, the three marks on the wood paneled walls form a rats face, or to others four marks converge into a hippopotamus’s smile, or for O’Keefe, the sunspots on a building become bite marks, that makes one wonder where these images emerge. Who would bite a building? Did something feel missing or unfulfilled in her viewing of it? For me these images emerge in the moment between glazed dissociation and acute awareness, creating correlations, sometimes impossible to understand, or random screams of desperation from the shadowy faces within the tree bark. Lately, these visual feelings have been in the form of eyes. Everything, it has appeared, takes on the form of the eye, that which is perceiving it, or perhaps, that which is perceiving me perceive it—an infinite cycle of perception, expansion, and reduction. Considering O’Keefe’s use of enlargement to force the viewing of her flower painting, made me consider what is necessary to force perception, and what it takes “to give that world to someone else.” Something that incapsulates the artist and the moment, rather than a simple copying, but that still grasps at the “objectivity” of photography. 


-BFM 






Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 13, 2022 at 4:34 PM

    Very interesting. What do you think distinguishes "visual feelings" from other kinds of feeling? I think you're right that there are distinctive feelings that arise from visual sensitivity, as there are from musical sensitivity, but how are they related to "passions"?

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